Facebook chief explains bear photo bareness

Facebook chief exec Mark Zuckerberg has responded to the derision that arose when previously private photos became public property after last week's privacy roll-back by the social networking site.

Under Facebook's new (much criticised) privacy controls system, users are encouraged to accept the wider sharing of their photos and posts to the social networking site. Previously private pictures of Zuckerberg - featuring him lounging in shorts around a pool, with a teddy bear and looking a tad inebriated - became exposed by the change.

How sites like Gawker and ourselves scoffed. Responding to this publicity, Zuckerberg wrote a wall post explaining to all and sundry that he'd agreed to make more of his pictures publicly available.

For those wondering, I set most of my content on my personal Facebook page to be open so people could see it. I set some of my content to be more private, but I didn't see a need to limit visibility of pics with my friends, family or my teddy bear :)

A Facebook spokesman told blogging site True/Slant that "[Zuckerberg] went through the transition tool like other users, evaluated the recommendations, and ended up accepting them."

The trouble with this explanation is, as Valleywag notes, that pictures of Zuckerberg and his teddy among others have been removed from public view.

So it seems that the revamped privacy control didn't do exactly what Zuckerberg wanted - or, if you're feeling charitable, needed a bit of fine tuning. The problem with fine tuning, however, is that search engines can catologue and index photos and posts during the time when they are available, so subsequent changes will also come too late. ®